A lot of ignorance needn’t stop you from offering contradictory theories
By Thoreau
I have no particular opinion on why there is a gender gap in certain fields of science. I have a lot of skepticism for various theories offered, but I have no theory of my own. And it isn’t just because it’s a hot potato issue where it would be easy to put a foot in my mouth. I really, honestly, find many explanations wanting. A discussion today should show why:
I was at an event where the topic of gender disparities and their origins came up. It was not my idea to open this topic, and I let a few other people put their feet firmly down their mouths before saying “Wow, look at that knee!” Specifically, a senior male colleague said that he had heard from somebody else that the most male-dominated fields are physics and electrical engineering because these fields supposedly have the most math and the most hands-on work with equipment. To be clear, he wasn’t saying that women are bad at these things, just that there’s something about our education system that causes fewer women to go into fields that require that combo. He had supposedly heard this from a woman with some street cred, so he was at least covered.
OK, several problems with it: First, if you want to talk about hands-on work, well, I can’t think of any science less hands-on than theoretical physics. Undergraduate physics programs probably have fewer lab courses than any other STEM discipline besides math. (I’ll let somebody else argue over whether computer science classes are “hands-on”, but if it involves time spent getting a piece of technology to work the way you want it to, it’s at least similar to a lab in many respects.) Sure, physics lab research is incredibly hands-on, with a lot of time spent building equipment, but (1) you don’t generally get to that part of physics early in the training and (2) it’s not like the other sciences have a shortage of hands-on work.
So it’s already a pretty suspect theory.
Then there’s the fact that math departments usually (with all exceptions duly noted) have a larger proportion of women than physics departments. So if math is a major turnoff, explain that. Oh, but the theory is that the combo of math and hands-on work is the turnoff. OK, then somebody can point to the fact that a lot of engineering disciplines have nearly as much math as electrical engineering (try solving the equations of fluid mechanics some time) and also plenty of labs. A mechanical engineering student could easily spend a day in the machine shop before going to the computer lab to crank out some solutions to fluid dynamics problems for flow in a pipe or something.
Anyway, a female colleague jumped in to observe that she finds that young girls (middle school, say) are more reluctant to do hands-on activities than boys of similar age. Now, we’ll leave aside whether plural anecdotes from a member of a group really constitute data on that group, and go to the question I asked her: Lots of people trying to sell some sort of pedagogical approach often say that making something hands-on and interactive and participatory does more to engage girls in science. They could be wrong (never trust somebody trying to sell you a curriculum product) but a lot of people say it, so if the theory is not right it’s at least widely approved. This gives me a dilemma: All these people say it’s hip and progressive to use hands-on interactive engagement, and then a woman comes along and says “No, the hands-on stuff is a turn-off.” So what am I to do?
Anyway, the whole conversation was a bunch of people approvingly (and cautiously) citing various contradictory theories. One of their theories might even be right, but the discussion itself shed little light.
So my official position is also my honest position, and it’s quite simple:Â I want to see more people of all groups succeed in science, but I don’t know that most of the people offering up theories really understand the problem as well as they think they do. Â A few people with reams of data might understand it, but people offering up theories at roundtable discussions are probably clueless.
Comment by Dustin —
April 24, 2009 @ 7:18 pm
Supposedly it’s social pressure. The people at the top of these fields have been in for so long that they come from a time when girls paid serious social consequences for being perceived as “smart.” That’s changed. The numbers are moving in a more equitable direction as more and more high school and undergrad programs learn that there’s nothing “innate” in women that prevents their entry into the sciences.
But you’ll find the same argument in a lot of fields. Very few women at the top of chess. Very few women CEOs. Very few famous women composers of classical music. I know this is a libertarian blog, but patriarchy’s still a very real thing. Particularist explanations simply won’t do.
Comment by fish —
April 24, 2009 @ 7:50 pm
Dustin, the problem with your argument is that there are science disciplines where integration of women is happening much faster. Trainees in Biomedical sciences have women as a small majority now. And while the upper levels are male-heavy, more and more balance is happening there too. I suspect there are some scientific disciplines where the hostility towards women is more persistent and that pushes young women away. I can’t however explain why the gender hostility would be unevenly distributed across the disciplines.
Comment by william —
April 24, 2009 @ 8:39 pm
What wastes my time is trying to find solid explanations as to why Astrophysics has such a high percentage of women compared to the rest of physics.
Comment by Thoreau —
April 24, 2009 @ 9:11 pm
Yep, astrophysics is one of those exceptions that shoots so many theories to hell.
Medicine is another exception that shoots so many theories to hell: “Fields with long, intensive training paths are a turn-off to women who want to have families, and fields with lots of arrogant jerks are unwelcoming.” All these things may be true, but medicine’s training path is at least as grueling as any field of physics, and medical doctors are renowned for arrogant jerkiness. Yet medicine has far more women than physics.
I am willing to believe that most explanations proferred offer some insight into some aspect of a complex phenomenon, but I’m skeptical of anybody who thinks that he/she has the whole thing figured out (unless that person has a ton of data).
Comment by Russell L. Carter —
April 24, 2009 @ 10:23 pm
I’ve had 30 years to think about this issue and I don’t have good explanations either, and I don’t like the explanations others give either. And I’m married to a MS Che and have a daughter who is kicking high school butt in math/sciences. But I don’t know what the difference between us and the rest of the population would be. (No irony!)
Comment by von Laue —
April 24, 2009 @ 10:32 pm
Thoreau, general agreement with your remarks on the medical field. I would further like to know how veterinary medicine fits into any general theory of men vs. women in higher education, seeing as how most vet schools are graduating >80% women. I think Kansas State graduated an all-female vet class a couple of years ago. Veterinary school is no walk in the park although I haven’t any idea how to ,compare it to physics or mechanical engineering.
Comment by Jackmormon —
April 25, 2009 @ 12:46 am
Wouldn’t mentoring, peer modeling, and departmental culture explain how some fields are becoming more equitable faster?
Comment by Thoreau —
April 25, 2009 @ 1:02 am
Jackmormon-
To a large extent, you’re probably right. I actually lean toward the social factors more than some intrinsic trait of whatever discipline. Still not sure it explains the decisions made by 18 year-olds before they even set foot in the university department. I’m skeptical that all the 18 year-old females out there with the smarts and confidence to choose astrophysics or biochemistry as a major are looking at physics (non-astro version) and math and freaking out.
Yeah, yeah, astro has the coolness factor, which I’ve talked about extensively here, and maybe that’s it. Then I have to wonder about all the people who tell me that 18 year-old women are eminently practical in picking their career paths, and they see women in their 30’s struggling as assistant professors with families and decide not to even pursue an undergraduate degree in the subject. OK, if they’re so practical, why did they pick astrophysics over more applied areas?
I am skeptical of everything.
Comment by Thoreau —
April 25, 2009 @ 1:07 am
BTW, I’m not looking for one and only one answer. Social phenomena are complex and multifaceted. But if somebody says “Young women are practical, choosing career paths that will be conducive to a career that’s compatible with a family, and they’re motivated more by curiosity and choose the fields that are coolest, and they want to pick disciplines that help people like the biomedical fields, and they are more interested in creativity than devices”, that’s just another way of saying that the speaker doesn’t really understand this either.
Comment by Janne —
April 25, 2009 @ 5:30 am
No idea if it’s unrelated or two aspects of the same underlying issue, but among young students only a minority – male or female – has any interest in engineering and the sciences, and as a society gets richer the proportion decreases.
It is not completely infeasible that out of whatever factors are pushing away the majority of all students from these fields, some of those factors could have more effect on women than men.
Comment by kid bitzer —
April 25, 2009 @ 7:39 am
we are in the middle of a period of change between two equilibria.
there was an equilibrium position when women were completely–legally, socially, religiously, etc.–excluded from participation in the sciences. (not all equilibria are nice, cf south, antebellum.)
there will be a new equilibrium at some point in the future when gender dynamics and the history of gender relations no longer influences career/study choices.
but during the period we are in, the picture is changing constantly and very rapidly (very very rapidly if you think in terms of millenia).
during this period, there are going to be a lot of contingent, path-dependent, first-entry phenomena that do not tell us much about either equilibrium state.
and furthermore, a dynamic phase like this is always really, really hard to understand.
i mean: suppose i have two large bodies of water separated by an earthen barrier that keeps one at a higher level than the other. then an earthquake cracks the earthen barrier, and i watch the process unfold as the water level in the two bodies equilibrates.
why is it swirling around in that spiral right there? why is there more on the north side of that big lump of dirt than on the south side? look at that big channel there–the more water that rushes through it, the more it erodes, and the more water rushes through it–but why did it start as a really little channel right there? why not ten feet north of that?
chaos theory may claim to have a very broad framework for answering at least some of these questions. but part of the answer that it gives (so far as i understand it) is going to be: there’s some math in it, but the math is too hard to actually crank through. cold comfort.
my point is: reaching a new equilibrium is an inherently chaotic process whose details are exquisitely sensitive to trivial differences in initial conditions.
and that’s true even when we’re dealing with water and relatively homogeneous dirt. i’m thinking that dealing with human beings as the point-particles is not going to make it better-behaved.
so i guess i’m agreeing with you. we know nothing. we won’t know nothing for quite awhile. we should resist the desire to find simple explanations–they are likely to reflect contingencies at best, artefacts of data collection more often.
we should just keep trying stuff. we’re still in the dynamic phase. we don’t even know what the future equilibrium will look like (and my water example was not intended to presuppose that everything will be 50/50 in the future. whatever it will be, it’s chaos for now).
just keep knocking down the obvious barriers, and don’t get too stuck on explanations.
Comment by qaz —
April 25, 2009 @ 8:53 am
When I went to college (admittedly a frighteningly long time ago), no one entered college knowing what they wanted to do. More importantly, no one left college doing what they had set out to do when they entered. Watching my undergraduate students here at BigStateResearchU, I don’t see any evidence that they are more cluefull about the future than we were. I can’t see how women are somehow looking at long-term difficulties and dropping out of certain science tracks as they start college.
Having said that, what is the actual data on drop out rates at each level? If there are small barriers at each level, then even though women entering these sciences are increasing by X% each year but Y% drop out at each level, then you are still looking at X*Y^n at each level, which is still very small at the high levels (since it is still dominated by the Y^n term).
I suspect kidbitzer #11 has it right. We need to be looking at very large very long trends. In a chaotic re-equilibrating system, anecdote and point observations are very unlikely to be indicative of larger scales.
Comment by Thoreau —
April 25, 2009 @ 12:07 pm
I also suspect that kid bitzer is closer to the truth than many of the theories out there. Along with that, I actually have a lot of sympathy for some of the critiques from feminist theory. Maybe not all the details, but the basic idea is that half the population has long been marginalized and discouraged, this doesn’t change overnight, and there are a ton of subtle cultural and social cues that will steer decisions people make. For whatever reason, those cues steer more women into one direction than another.
To the extent that that is true, the solution is probably just more hard work on lots of levels, trying to encourage women to study science. The absence of a single, unifying theory means there is no silver bullet. We can’t just say “More childcare for assistant professors and 18 year-old women will choose to major in our subject!” or “Adopt my hip, progressive teaching method that is (circle one: More hands on and conducive to participation, less tool-oriented and more conducive to discussion) and female students will flock to your discipline!”
But even then, I’m skeptical of the idea I gravitate toward, because lots of work has been done by lots of women (and men) for decades and some differences between fields are persistent.
Bottom line: There’s a lot that we don’t understand.
Comment by CCPhysicist —
April 25, 2009 @ 1:17 pm
Since there is no shortage of attempts to fix the imbalance in STEM areas based on wild guesses at what might help (usually leaning toward money, support, and social structures), this is worth talking about.
I like the suggestion about not drawing conclusions while in a state of wild disequilibrium, and think your critique of many standard arguments is on the mark. I lean toward social explanations, including “maybe they like that subject better”.
My own personal theory is that more women enter biology because it is the first science they take in HS and thus the first one they have a chance to like. In my HS, biology and math were also the places where you were most likely to find a female role model.
But then there is the instance of a youngish (returning student) woman who was urged to consider engineering as a career by one of our (female) math profs based on her skills in college algebra, and picked “mechanical” based on pictures in a career guide. It turns out that she is great in the machine shop and a real star in her classes. Maybe the statistics we see are the average of stochastic processes like that one. Time will tell.
Comment by EE Prof —
April 25, 2009 @ 1:54 pm
The numbers (at least where I work) show female EE students graduating at a higher rate than males, but of course signing up at a dramatically lower rate. A large part of whatever we’re doing to scare them off largely happens pre-college.
My wild ass unsubstantiated theory: women don’t like fields with a lot of nerdish, somewhat effeminate men.
Slightly more serious theory: there is a strong chicken and egg component to the problem. Women don’t go into EE because there aren’t many women in EE. When they do sign up for our program, it tends to be in clusters. We’ll have a year that’s 1/30 and then the next year it’s 9/30.
Comment by Melanie —
April 25, 2009 @ 3:37 pm
As a woman in physics, with many friends who are women in physics, I thought I might have a decent insight on this. Women seem to, in general, have more caring for people, and less for things, or ideas. Even smart women. So, fields like biology attract them, because they can find the cure for cancer or disease. Medicine attracts them because they can help the sick.
It is harder to show that physics or electrical engineering will directly help anyone. I study neutrinos, and the number one thing I get asked by women is “Oh. So how is that going to help people?” And of course my answer is “Well, right now it doesn’t. But that doesn’t mean it never will.” Still, I don’t do it because I want to help people. I do it because I think it’s cool. My friend Michelle, who is also a high energy physicist, told me she thought of dropping out after she gets her PhD so she can do something that helps people more. So, if even the girls who are in physics have trouble finding motivation to stay in it, it is no surprise that so few go into it in the first place.
Comment by Thoreau —
April 25, 2009 @ 10:34 pm
Melanie,
Everything you say may very well be true. The problem I have is not so much with any particular idea (which may, for all I know, be true) as with the general way these discussions go.
I saw a curriculum reform project by a woman in astrophysics who said “Women are more interested in ideas and concepts than many of the dry systems presented in standard freshman physics.” [Aside from me: Damn near everybody is more interested in, well, just about anything other than a block of mass m on an inclined plane. It's not a gender thing.] “Fields like astrophysics and cosmology hold more appeal for women because of this. So, I propose to bring more ideas of astrophysics and cosmology into the intro curriculum to get women interested in physics.”
Maybe she’s right. Maybe her data is good. Maybe she’s wrong. But she’s a woman passionate about the issue and she has an interesting idea, so everybody approves.
Then somebody else can come along and say “Women are more interested in things that help people than in abstract concepts taught in most of physics. So I want to bring biophysics into the curriculum and this will help interest girls in physics.” And maybe she’s right. Or not. But she’s a woman who cares about the issue and she has an interesting idea, so everybody nods approvingly.
Then somebody else comes along and says something about how women are drawn to interdisciplinary science. And maybe she’s right. Or not. But, again, everybody nods.
In fact, somebody else could come along and observe that women prefer mechanical engineering over electrical engineering [yes, a senior male colleague observed this] and argue that all those “block of mass m on an inclined plane” problems, being more relevant to mechanical engineering, are the way to go. (Aside: I tried a curriculum that de-emphasized those traditional problems in favor of more fundamental aspects, but half the students were mechanical engineers. It didn’t work very well for the men or the women.)
What it says to me is that there are lots of women with lots of different outlooks on life and different areas of interest, i.e. they’re human beings who don’t fit into a single mold. But these discussions always have lots of theories flying around that are offered as The Answer: Cosmology is the answer, because women like ideas. Except when biophysics is the answer, because women want to help people. Except when hands-on activities are the answer, because women like to see how these things connect to real life. Except when discussions are the answer, because because the kinesthetic approach is more of a boy thing. (Yes, a woman offered that theory.) Except when the kinesthetic approach is the answer, because a woman in another science department believes in it.
I’m more and more skeptical of lines of discussion that try to reduce it to one aspect of the subject matter and declare that this is The Answer to why one field has more women than another.